Britain Yearly Meeting Minute on Gaza
June 3, 2025 § 2 Comments
At their annual gathering recently, Quakers in Britain became the first British church to state their belief that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. (Download a pdf of the minute here.) I happen to agree with their discernment and pray that their minute was approved in a truly gathered meeting.
However, I really don’t like the minute itself. Like almost all of the minutes of conscience I’ve seen approved by meetings in the “liberal” branch of Quakerism, most of this minute reads as though it were written by a secular social change nonprofit. (But at least these minutes are being drafted and approved; we almost never hear from the evangelicals.)
Here’s a synopsis: The minute mentions previous action by their Meeting for Sufferings (without explaining to non-Quaker readers what that is). It describes collective horror at the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. It reviews the problems with a declaration of genocide. It offers two tenets of Quakerism as rationale for their stand. And it makes some appeals to action.
Here are those statements of Quaker faith given as rationale:
Central to Quakerism is the experience that there is that of God in everyone. From this belief – that all people are unique, precious, children of God – all others follow. We therefore abhor racism, including antisemitism, in all its forms.
. . .
It is also a tenet of Quakerism that violence can never be the answer. That the means are just as important as the ends. This is our peace testimony that has led us for more than 350 years to eschew all war and all violence at all times.
That’s 87 “religious” words out of a total of 944, less than ten percent of the minute.
I have problems not with its message, but with how it represents the Religious Society of Friends and our testimonies and with the weakness of its moral argument.
Integrity and misrepresentation
Central to Quakerism
The minute presents “the experience that there is that of God in everyone” as the foundation from which all our other beliefs follow. This simply is not true. it is not central to Quakerism. It might be central to a lot of Quakers in the so-called liberal branch of the movement, but it certainly is not central to the much larger evangelical branches, or to Conservative Friends. We shouldn’t be speaking of “Quakerism” with such a broad brush.
Nor is it central even to “liberal” Quakerism, except as a kind of unreflective doctrinal drift. We’ve been saying this kind of thing for decades now without any meaningful corporate discernment. It’s been slipping into our books of faith and practice and getting approved, much like a sly amendment to a massive legislative bill that most representatives haven’t noticed. Meanwhile, no meeting has actually carefully unpacked and considered the meaning or standing of this phrase “that of God in everyone” on its own. We think George Fox said it so now we can say it, too; meanwhile, George Fox never actually did say it.
Moreover, there are still quite a few of us “liberal” Friends who do know that Fox never said it that way and wouldn’t have ever said it, and we would never say that it’s the foundation of our religious faith and experience as stated. We might be in the minority in a lot of meetings, but if a meaningful discernment process actually took place in our yearly meeting’s revision of their faith and practice, we would stand in the way. Well, I would, anyway.
That of God in everyone
And anyway, what does “that of God in everyone” mean? The minute does not explain. What do we mean by “that of”? What or who do we mean by “God”? And what does “that of God” mean? And how do we experience it, or say we do, in “everyone”? We can say we believe it’s in everyone, but can we experience it in everyone? I can’t.
I suppose this statement tries to express what I agree is perhaps the central experience of Friends, that we humans can commune directly with God (however we experience the Divine), personally, inwardly, immediately. But why and how would this experience lead us to “abhor racism”? Because, in that experience, God’s anointing Spirit, the spirit of the christ, awakens and guides us to love and compassion, to truth and service. That’s the real message here: we are led into love and compassion by the Spirit, whatever each of us might mean by that, not by the “experience” of some abstract notion about our nature as humans.
What’s missing
This is what’s missing in this minute—religious and moral appeal, especially to love and compassion. I suppose it’s worth something to be the first church in Britain to call Israeli action in Gaza genocide; it will get attention. But I’m not sure it’s the most powerful thing we can say. The unique and powerful thing we as Quakers have to offer is our religious and moral message and appeal and our guidance from the Spirit. The secular activists are not going to talk like that, or appeal to the people for whom religious and moral appeal might be appealing.
That means speaking from our religious tradition. Specifically, we should use the prophetic voice of Hebrew and Christian scripture, because it’s a powerful voice and a powerful message, and it might appeal to the hearts and souls of people who are inured to political polemic, especially those who at least claim to be people of faith. And I would use queries, not declarations.
For instance: With their horrific actions and policies, are you the Israeli government and your military loving God with all your hearts and souls and strength, as God demanded in Deuteronomy? Are you loving your neighbors as yourselves, as God demanded in Leviticus?
Or: You want to be a “Christian nation”, you American Christian conservatives in government and other institutions of power who support and supply these atrocities? What about Jesus’ commandment of love? Is American military support loving one another even as we have been loved? Is helping to slaughter and starve children, who are “the least of these”, not re-crucifying Christ all over again? Is killing them inviting these “little children” to come unto him?
Well, now I’ve slipped into an American focus. This minute comes from Britain Yearly Meeting. I’m not sure whether Britain has a comparable Christian nationalist element, like we do here. But Britain does still have a national church. If I were a British Friend, I would be in challenging dialogue with the Church of England about this situation—unless they are already in unity with a Prince of Peace message. Then I would join with our religious fellow travelers.
I would be moral and religious, prophetic and traditional, in both voice and message.
The First “Palm Sunday”
April 13, 2025 § 4 Comments
Today is Palm Sunday and the weird political vibe of our time prompts me to reflect on the first “Palm Sunday.” The first “Palm Sunday” was a radical political event, but its import has not been taught to us. In fact, a surface reading of the accounts does not even really tell us what actually happened, let alone what the event meant in the moment.
Just a little imagination and common sense shows us something quite different than the “cleansing of the temple” summary that we usually get as a heading in our Bibles for these passages. While Jesus was vehemently opposed to the corruption of the temple, he was not much concerned with its “uncleanness”; he famously disregarded his culture’s obsession with “uncleanness” in the first place. His real concern was the temple’s thievery.
It started out with what amounted to a royal coronation procession into the gates of Jerusalem in which he and his followers proclaimed that God’s kingdom was being established right then and there. Never mind those high priests behind the curtain pretending to be in charge of Judea’s temple-state, or the Roman imperial occupiers who had the final say over all the really important stuff in Judea’s governance.
After proclaiming his alternative kingdom, what does the herald of this new kingdom do next? He raids the temple-state’s currency exchange.
Jesus and his followers burst into the court where Jews from all over the empire, who had come to celebrate Passover in the Holy Land, have come to change their unclean foreign currency for temple-state coinage and then buy the animals they need for their guilt offerings and sin offerings and for Passover itself.
Picture the scene: Jesus and his followers drive the animals into a frenzy. He or his people pitch over the cashiers’ tables, with their record keeping scrolls and their trays of money. His people intercept the servants who are desperately trying to escape into the temple precincts with the “vessels”.
This is the scene: Animals are crashing around, the noise a raucous din, maybe the door has been left open and the animals are making a break for it. Disciples are grabbing the record scrolls off the floor and making off with them or tearing them up. Others are scrambling on the floor to scoop up the coins that are rolling around. Others seize the big clay jars with the coin reserves in them that the temple servants are trying to escape with. And all the while, Jesus is calling down an oracle of God’s judgment, quoting Jeremiah about a “den of thieves”, while his own people are themselves Robin Hood-thieving the temple-state’s money. A wonderful, even comical irony.
If the insurrectionists had left the door open and the animals are finding their way out, you can picture his followers making their escape, too, under cover of the herd’s bleating retreat out the door, much like Odysseus did with his men when escaping from the cyclops’s cave in the Odyssey.
One wonders where the security forces were in this melee. Surely the temple-state had some kind of security there to guard the money. Maybe they are the “servants” who try to make it to the doors with the “vessels.” Clearly the mayhem, the tactical genius of the action, outmaneuvers them.
Meanwhile, all this takes place in the literal shadow of the Roman fort that had been built right up against the city’s walls next to the temple precinct to prevent exactly this kind of peasant revolt from happening, as it had occurred just a few years before and would soon again. Passover is, after all, a religious holiday celebrating God liberating his people from their captivity by a foreign imperial power. Rome sent an entire extra legion to Palestine during the Passover season to deal with any insurrectionists (like Jesus) who might be too inspired by the holiday’s message, because it happened so often.
Meanwhile, the city is extremely crowded with all the pilgrims from the Jewish Roman diaspora come here for Passover, crowded in a massive tent city throughout the streets of the city because there aren’t enough rooms to let. People, tens, animals, all trying to find a place as close to the temple as possible, ‘cause that’s where all the action is, that’s where all the crowds will be going. It’s as if all the families in America that could afford it planned to go to Disney World on the same day.
So the rioters just melt into the massive crowds with their loot and maybe some animals and their grins on their faces, while the Roman soldiers arrive too late to do anything but scoop up some leftover coins themselves.
I imagine the high priests in charge of the temple-state calling the guys in charge of the exchange onto the carpet to answer for the loss of all that revenue and monetary reserves, maybe taking it out of their salaries, or even out of their hides. I imagine the famously cruel and erratic Pontius Pilate calling the garrison commander onto the carpet to answer for how he let this rabble raid the temple under their very noses and demanding some intel about where the insurrectionist leader might have skied off to—“He announced himself at the city gates, for Tiberius’s sake. What—were you playing lots with your officers and drinking this terrible Judean wine while a riot breaks out next door?” I wonder who lost their commission that day?
No wonder they all wanted his head.
The Christian faith is radical in its very core, and much of the gospel message is about money, poverty, and economic oppression—“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” reads the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer.
Ani, the Hebrew word for “poor,” can mean either poor or oppressed because, in ancient Israel, they were the same thing. Ani, as in Bethany—beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed, home of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Simon the Leper. Ani, the poor and oppressed, are Jesus’ constituency (Like 15-30). And “Palm Sunday” was their breakout moment, their formal declaration of their kingdom intentions and their first insurrectionist act.
Sarah Ruden on the Apostle Paul
March 13, 2025 § 2 Comments
Dear Friends
I’ve started another of Sarah Ruden’s books: Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own time. It promises to be exceedingly good. As a classics scholar, she reads Paul against the backdrop of contemporary (to him) Greco-Roman literature and culture. I’m sharing a couple of examples from early in the book.
Here’s the first couple of paragraphs from chapter 1: Paul and Aristophanes—No, Really, an another from a paragraph a few pages later :
The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.
But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant “just the ability to project my power and essence.” Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn’t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sorcery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace’s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Emipire—certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main readership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it. I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity.
Then later:
What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul’s writings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far—and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the komos and the right to have a really good party. The “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Galatians does not forbid “carousing,” the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or “revellings,” as in the King James. A komos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parad—which could even end in kidnapping and rape. We have livid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like the rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their elders would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have “orgies,” but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgy-like, but not the komos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of is both serious and customary.
A Prayer
March 9, 2025 § 2 Comments
I have found myself speaking quite often in meeting lately. Maybe it’s because I’m working on a submission on vocal ministry to Pendle Hill Pamphlets, so vocal ministry is not just on my mind, but really in my mind. It’s been making me nervous, speaking often like this, more consistently than I every have in the past—three times in four weeks, maybe four times in six weeks. Oy.
Furthermore, I’m relatively new to the meeting, so I’m worried about how it looks to have this newcomer loading up an early morning worship that not infrequently goes silent the whole hour, as it did this morning.
All these concerns are beside the point, of course. The only thing that really matters is whether I’ve been called. But this new trend has me worried about that, too. Am I really called to speak this consistently?
So I went to meeting this morning set on resisting, and so I did. And that resistance had me literally quaking for the last ten minutes. This was made both easier and more difficult, paradoxically, because the message was a prayer. I have only brought vocal prayer to meeting three times in 38 years, and one of them was an extremely harrowing experience. But I held on to my resolve and did not speak. Was I unfaithful? In the end, it felt okay, but . . . I relieved the pressure by sharing the prayer in “afterthoughts”, so I got it out after all.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with afterthoughts and I think it’s possible that I have not offered one afterthought in all my time as a Friend. I suspect, with no clear evidence, that afterthoughts have some kind of feedback effect on the vocal ministry—but what effect? Does it protect the worship from shallow ministry or lower the bar? I’ve been in meetings that have them and meetings that don’t, and I still can’t tell. But my instincts tell me that afterthoughts must have some kind of effect on the worship that precedes them.
Well, anyway, here is that prayer:
Our Father, who art in the mystery of transcendence;
Our Mother, who art in the earth in her immanence;
Our Holy Spirit, which art in each of us a holy presence;
hallow our hearts and minds to your guidance.
Please help us to bring divine love into the world.
Please give all of us who are in need the necessities of the day.
Please help us to treat others as we want to be treated.
Please help us to resist the temptation to do wrong,
and to have the wisdom and strength to do what is right.
And thank you, thank you, thank you.
Prophetic Stream Pipeline
March 3, 2025 § Leave a comment
Each of our testimonies has come into the light through the Light.
Someone turns toward the light within them and the Holy Spirit inspires an opening. Sometimes the opening matures into a message. If the message falls on fertile soil it bears fruit. The fruit is tested and if it lasts (John 15:16), it becomes a settled testimony.
Vocal ministry is the pipeline of revelation; it carries new truth from the prophetic stream into the lives of our members and our meetings.
I have seen this glorious process take place myself. In 1986, Marshall Massey brought a message to the Friends General Conference Gathering about the travails of the earth and an appeal for Quaker meetings to form earthcare committees. Less than a month later, two Friends brought his message from the Gathering to the annual sessions of New York Yearly Meeting. A handful of us came to hear that message and we did have ears to hear. Soon we had formed an earthcare task group. The yearly meeting eventually laid down that task group without forming a standing committee, but in the meantime, it had revised its Faith and Practice to include a testimony on earthcare.
The Holy Spirit is always trying to carry us forward with new truth about how to live rightly in the world.
Love One Another
February 23, 2025 § Leave a comment
When the Quaker movement chose the Religious Society of Friends for its formal name, we placed love at the heart of our identity as a people of God. We took the name from a passage in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of John, a passage that is bookended by the commandment to love:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because i have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commandments so that you may love one another.
I am sure that Jesus had deep feelings of love for his disciples, but the love he is commanding here is not primarily a feeling; it is a commandment, and you cannot command feelings. The love he is talking about is something you do, not so much something you feel; it is treating each other right, even when you don’t feel like it.
And this kind of active love bears fruit, fruit that lasts.
A Comforter in the Hour of Need
February 2, 2025 § Leave a comment
In several places in Christian scripture, Jesus promises to send a Comforter, an Advocate, to his disciples in their hour of need. Do you have a spiritual Comforter to whom you can turn in your hour of need?
Perhaps a spiritual ally, Jesus himself or a Spirit who fills your soul when you invite their presence?
Or a person in your life, or a historical personage, or even a fictional personage who brings you joy when you think of them?
Or an experience or memory that gives you joy when you recall it?
Or some piece of art or an image that lifts your spirits when you bring it to mind?
Or some piece of music that calms you and brings you to your center?
We can hold such an Advocate in the chapel of our heart as a reflection of the Light within us, whose presence there brings peace and strength and hope, even in these very difficult times.
I have such an ally and I can testify that it never fails to give me joy.
Early Quaker Christology and Blasphemy
January 12, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve been reading “Accusations of Blasphemy in English Anti-Quaker Polemic, c. 1660–1701,” by David Manning, from Quaker Studies 14/1 (2009) [27–56]. The article focuses on polemical charges of blasphemy against early Quakers based primarily on early Friends’ theology of the light within as anti-Trinitarian and on a claim that Quakers were identifying themselves with God.
Before sharing some of the article, it’s worth noting that George Fox was charged with blasphemy three times, tried twice, and convicted once and got jail time. There probably would have been more trials, but his magistrate for the second trial happened to be none other than Judge Fell, Margaret’s first husband. Fox and Fell met before the trial and uncovered a loophole in the law and Fox got off on a technicality. Judge Fell was such a senior and respected jurist that the third charge never went to trial because they knew they would lose, and it probably kept other prosecutors from bringing charges. And then, of course, there was James Naylor.
Pamphlet wars about these claims raged between Quakers and anti-Quakers throughout this period, to which William Penn was a major contributor. Part of the problem was that early Friends were inconsistent about their theology in this period, so it was hard to pin them down. Manning draws on the work of Leo Damrosch and Ted Underwood*, writing: “. . . no definitive account of early Quaker theology can be written because early Quakers regularly equivocated about their beliefs and that their early theology was, quite understandably, somewhat fluid and contestable precisely because it was a new and developing belief system**.” Which hasn’t stopped most of us from offering “definitive accounts” of early Quaker theology anyway.
But as to the theological claims that gave rise to charges of blasphemy, Manning writes:
The terms Christ, God, and Holy Spirit were not denied, but appeared to have been used interchangeably to describe the Light, rather than to acknowledge the existence of distinct divine persons. Early Quakers most commonly identified the Light with Christ, professing that the pre-incarnate and the incarnate Christ were the same. Christ on earth was, therefore, not manifest in human form, but a celestial being in the vessel of a human body. [emphasis mine] Thus, from this position, Christ was wholly supernatural and provided a uniquely spiritual soteriology [salvation theology]. . . .
The Quakers’ type of non-Trinitarianism meant that they rejected the traditional tenets of Christian belief: faith was not a bridge between human and divine, and mortals did not receive the grace of God, but experienced him immediately (i.e. without mediation). For the Quakers, the language of ‘inwardness’ was effectively a euphemism for the only true way to form a relationship with Christ; for his celestial being had no cause, or means, to mediate with humans, but dwelt within them. . . . one can appreciate the thrust of [Richard Bailey’s] argument that Quaker conviction hinged upon a Christo-present, rather than Christo-centric belief system***.
I read Bailey’s book (New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God) some time ago and found it both fascinating and challenging. Here’s a quote from it along similar lines as above taken from Fox’s The Great Mystery of the Great Whore. This is Fox speaking:
God’s Christ is not distinct from his saints, nor their bodies, for he is within them, nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witness him . . . he is in the saints, and they eat his flesh, and sit within him in heavenly places.”
This is weird stuff. It is truly unorthodox, and it is much more radical thinking than later Quaker Christology, which has, it seems to me, been retrojected onto Fox and early Friends in apparent embarrassment, or maybe just through incredulity and misunderstanding. Assuming that Damrosch, Underwood, Manning, and Bailey are not the ones who misunderstand. Moreover, these quotes echo ideas in Glen D. Reynolds’s Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective, and some of the insights of Rosemary Moore in The Light in their Consciences..
Those anti-Quakers might have been right, from the orthodox point of view.
Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Naylor and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. Ted Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth Century England.
Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God.
Holding in the Light – Meetings for Healing
January 9, 2025 § 1 Comment
Usually, when we’re asked to hold someone in the light, it’s in the midst of some other situation, very often just after meeting for worship, and we devote no real time or attention to the practice. This is why I feel it’s mostly an outward form whose only value is the shared sympathy it evokes in the gathering. This is no small thing, but it’s not a serious attempt at healing or even comforting the person held. For real attempts at healing, we need a dedicated meeting for healing.
I know that Friends with deeper commitment to the gift of healing than mine, and with broader and more current study and experience, hold meetings for healing among Friends. I’ve never attended one, so I don’t know what these other models are. But I’m sure that other approaches could be at least as effective as the one I describe below. But this is what I know can work—not often, to be honest, but sometimes.
I mentioned my training in Silva Mind Control in previous posts in this series. As a teacher, I used to lead programs for graduates of the course in which healing circles figured regularly and prominently. That practice might offer a model for our own meetings for healing.
The Mind Control practice was an energy circle. We sat in a tight circle holding hands. If we were working on someone in the group, they sat in the middle. The leader would guide a meditation in which we used the deepening technique Mind Control taught and then visualized energy—light—moving from us out of our right hands into the person next to us, and on around the circle, and back into us through our left hand from the person on our left. It was like a spiritual cyclotron, which is a physics particle accelerator that uses two “D”-shaped magnets to spin electrons around in a circle.
At some point, the leader would ask us to all visualize the energy curving up to an apex above the center of the circle and then either funneling down on the person in the middle or out to whomever we were working on at a distance. If the latter, then we called up whatever visual images of the recipient we have, either in memory or in imagination.
It was that simple, all of it easily adapted to Quaker faith and practice. First, deepening, however you do that. Then calling up the Light within. Then cycling the energy—the Light—in the circle until a “clerk” senses that the circle and the energy/light are ready. Then focusing the “beam” on the recipient and holding it there until the “clerk” feels the work is done.
Whatever the “therapeutic” results for the recipient, the practice builds strong bonds between the participants. The energy is often palpable, beautiful, even thrilling, with compassion and desire for healing rising within in wonderful waves. This emotional energy is perhaps where the healing actually draws its power, rather than the exercise of imagination.
Holding in the Light – Healing Energy
January 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
In my last post, I questioned whether holding someone in the light does more than jusst make the people who do it feel better. But I do think it could do more; I think it could sometimes actually project healing energy to the recipient. I have seen this work. But it needs more shaping than we give it when we simply ask the meeting to hold someone in the light. In my experience, it needs two things: a shared method and focus.
I get these recommendations from my experience as a teacher of Silva Mind Control in the 1970s. Mind Control is a sinister-sounding name for a rather benign and potentially beneficial self-help program that teaches some deepening exercises and a number of techniques for improving everyday life. But to our point, the course also provides extensive training in spiritual healing. I should rather say Mind Control “taught” me these things, since that was fifty years ago and I’m not sure what the program is like these days.
The course offered a coherent mindset and a set of psycho-spiritual tools for healing that I have seen perform near miracles. Rarely, but really. I believe in its basic approach, which I’ve adapted in the recommendations below.
Shared method
Unless you have someone among you truly possesses the gift of spiritual healing, healing at a distance seems to need everybody doing the same thing, and that thing needs effective discipline behind it. The discipline involves two things: deepening, and a mindform. And they both benefit from practice.
Deepening
I believe it is nearly impossible for most of us to heal someone effectively at a distance without working from an altered state of consciousness. Thus one would be tempted to ask for holding someone in the light during meeting for worship, since then we are all already in the depths, and when a group enters a deeper consciousness together, then things can really happen. But that’s not our way of worship. However, usually we have just finished worshipping when this request comes up, so a little time to sink back down into some meaningful silence would help.
Mindforms
Mindforms are mental images given a formal shape and powered by emotional energy. Here’s an adaptation of how Mind Control does this:
You imagine yourself in a place that empowers you for healing, an environment that both energizes you and has in it the “tools” you use to heal. In this case, we’re talking about light, so presumably you need some light source. You also imagine some way to send that light out toward the recipient. And you can also imagine some spiritual ally or allies, helpers in the work. Or not.
The idea is to dedicate a meditation to discovering what this environment is, what your “tools” are, and what “allies” you might have. You just sit and wait until images come to the fore in your mind that are vivid enough to feel like they have some sustaining value. A little like your discernment of vocal ministry.
Then you enter this environment, take up your tools, greet any allies, and get to work. You could enter this spiritual space while the person who closed meeting for worship is asking for any joys and concerns, or however your meeting does this.
So this exercise could be a dance floor on which you dance with Christ, whose hands are full of light. It might be the Pool of Bethsaida in the fifth chapter of the gospel of John, a pool of light into which you “baptize” the recipient. It could be a garden with a gardener and fruit that is full of light. It could be a laboratory with a laser and animated charts of the human anatomy. It will be whatever has been revealed to you.
My ally—don’t laugh, he’s done some amazing things—is Santa Claus; not the roly-poly commercial figure, but a robust man in his late forties modeled on the character in L. Frank Baum’s book The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (yes, the L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame). Santa gives me a wrapped gift and inside is whatever I need to do the healing.
As you repeatedly return to the environment that has been revealed to you, it gets more comfortable, you sink more quickly, it reveals to you more options. It becomes a place of energy and joy.
Focus
This work needs more than the bare information we usually get in meeting. A full name and a specific location—city and state—are the bare minimum required, according to Mind Control. More information is better, like the recipient’s relationship to the petitioner and some distinctive personal traits, maybe whatever ails them.
And the petitioner can serve as a channel. She or he is often our only real connection to the recipient. I imagine pouring energy through the petitioner to the recipient, or storing it inside the petitioner like a battery waiting to discharge on their next contact.
And if you know the recipient yourself, then you can really focus. You picture them in their environment or in a place that you often share, trying to bring their person, their face, their clothing, the way they move and talk, all the details you can, into bright focus. Then, zap! Do whatever has been revealed to you.
Through the Flaming Sword 